Okay, cut that.

But, you know, so I just loved Ghost.

And it's something I kept coming back to.

I did an Edinburgh show, which was like a kind of comedy, sort of parody version of Most Haunted, called Alive Ghost, you know, with Dan Tetzel.

I did various talks about it.

I just kept coming back to it, kept coming back to it.

And just, I think there was a certain point a few years ago when I just felt very... unfulfilled by what I was doing in terms of the comedy writing.

I mean, you just don't know, right? And it made me, I know there's been a lot of really in-depth American podcasts about Bigfoot, but I wonder, did that

So tell us a little bit about, um, Pliny the Younger.

Yeah.

No, this is, this is interesting.

I mean, the, I think the first ever ghost story is about sort of 3,500 years ago, this ancient stone tablet.

But the, the first use of a, a haunted house seems to be this story, yes, as you say, by Pliny the Younger.

And he tells the story of a, a philosopher called Athenodorus who is living in a house that appears to be haunted, and he hears rattling chains.

So it's, uh, that classic ghost story trope now really, isn't it? Uh, something that we, that we associate with ghosts instantly, you know? You hear, you hear those and, uh, it's a kind of, um, Pavlov's dogs kind of moment.

You have?

However, this happened."

I, I, I guess those are the stories I'm drawn to really, uh, because it's so discombobulating.

It, it started off with this guy, Ken, uh, who wrote to me, and people who are familiar with the series will know that he became quite a big figure because he told me this story set in a, a university hall of residence in, in Belfast in the early nineteen eighties.

And he was-- he, I mean, he is the, the kind of prime uncanny witness, really.

He's an eminent geneticist who definitely even now still does not believe in ghosts, doesn't believe it's possible, and yet was just so kind of poleaxed by this experience he'd had as a student, where he had these seemingly paranormal experiences, seeing things, you know, witnessing what he, what was potentially poltergeist activity, and then discovering that the people that had lived there in that same room the year before and then the same room the year after had also had almost identical experiences.

And as a scientist, you know, he was fascinated by this.

But the reason he told me was really he'd heard a series I did called the Battersea Poltergeist, and he just was intrigued by [laughs] the fact that other people were having these experiences, and he felt, well, maybe my experiences shouldn't die with me.

And I think-

Yeah.

So how do you bring these stories to a stage? Yeah.

Good question.

Well, look, I mean, the easy way to do a podcast show on stage is people sitting around chatting with a few chairs.

We don't do that.

This is much, much more theatrical and exciting than that.

You know, think something like Woman in Black, you know, or my own stage play that I wrote, 222, A Ghost Story.

But, you know, are ghosts malevolent? Are they like Casper? Or, you know, what's their deal kind of thing?

You know, people just, this image floating about with how they, you know, stuck in that image of how they died in their last days or is it just a feeling in a room is it a noise is it what the fuck is it how

long have you got okay so there's lots of different theories i mean there's one theory which people call stone tape theory which is that ghosts are recordings basically and it's it kind of has this basis in the idea of buildings recording things you know the idea of a building recording past trauma past events but Certainly there's a kind of vision of ghosts as being something playing back.

Lots of hauntings that get reported feel like something going through the same motions it went through in life.

One of the classics is a guy who saw a legion of Roman soldiers walking through a cellar in York, and he could only see them from the knee up.

And then they discovered later on that the reason, potentially, was that the Roman road that run through that area was about that distance below the ground where he saw them, you know, about kind of knee to foot.

Lower, so that's an intriguing thought.

There's an idea of ghosts as energy, and actually there's an idea of ghosts coming from within us.

Why do we always do impressions of ghosts as, oh, surely ghosts just talk normally?